Is My Team Ploughing Essay

How big of an impact do you make on society? If you were to die tomorrow to what extent would the people you know be affected? How quickly would they move on? The sad fact is that, eventually everyone would move on, the gap you left in society would be filled, and you would soon be only a memory. In “Is My Team Ploughing?” the narrator shows how life progresses after one passes. Also, Housman makes use of great punctuation and diction to communicate how guilty the living feels continuing on after someone dear dies.
The author, A.E Housman, uses the poem’s structure to be able to show how life continues normally and how people feel guilty about it. The poem has an ABCB rhyming scheme, meaning every other word rhymes, which gives the poem a very musical flow. The use of the punctuation reveals that there is only one speaker. Only the questions, which are the odd stanzas, are surrounded by quotation marks. This shows the readers that the narrator, who was the friend of the deceased man, is having a conversation with himself, which is due the guilt of moving on and sleeping with his friend's “girl”. The poem is eight stanzas long, with four questions and four responses.
The poem starts in a very casual manner; the dialogue consists of mostly small talk. First, the dead man asks if the farm is still functioning properly. The narrator replies that there is “No change though you lie under the land you used to plough”. Next, the man wants to know if the boys are still playing football. The narrator responds with, “Ay the ball is flying, the lads play heart and soul”. Then, the man wonders if his “girl” has stopped crying over his death and the tone changes. The narrator and his dead friends’ sweetheart have moved on and are already in a relationship together. Uneasily, the narrator answers that “Your girl is well